KILL YOUR TELEVISION: Great moment at the festival: I caught up with keynoters Philip Torrone and Limor Fried at the Make magazine booth on the trade show floor. They showed me a little device they had hacked together to turn off television sets. Although the battery was wearing down, they did some quick fixes and demonstrated on the massive plasma screen in the AOL booth across the aisle. The AOL folks’ chagrin was palpable, as they poked around their wires and cords to try to fix their sudden, mysterious outage.

Torrone said the device, called the WaveBubble, could also cut off cell phones. “It’s a conversation starter,” he said. “Do we really own the 5-foot bubble around us?…. If you take public transporation, it’s not socially acceptable to tell somebody to shut up. It’s a technology solution to a social problem, which is funny. We shouldn’t need it.”

ONCE A GEEK, ALWAYS A GEEK: When I was in town for interactive, it struck me how hip everyone was, with their tattoos, rectangular glasses and shaved heads. But when they left and I stayed for music, I got a lesson in true hipness. Gone were the laptops, the BlackBerries, and the Twitterers. In their place were truly cool people, toting guitars, rocking all night long.

DORKBOT: If there was any doubt about the geeky nature of SXSW, it was dispelled with a Dorkbot gathering. The name says it all. Its slogan involves bringing artists and hackers together to do strange things with electricity. And indeed it was pretty amazing to see the things these people had hammered together: a sidewalk telescope, dancing robots, guitars that played just by waving a hand over an electronic device. Here’s to the hackers!

GET SATISFACTION — SOON: There’s a new company coming to San Francisco called Satisfaction, and it was co-host of a party in Austin. But the party was a little premature, in that the product is not yet out there.

Thor Muller of Rubyred Labs will be CEO of the company, and he does give a hint about its mission: Better customer service. The thinking is simple: Many companies have lousy customer service. Forums are hard to search. But users are passionate about the products they use. Satisfaction has a scheme in the works that sounds like it’ll use those communities to solve the customer service conundrum, and probably without going through the companies themselves.

One thing was sure, people had a good time at the party at the Scoot Inn. So good, in fact, that some twitters went around that the Inn lost its liquor license. Not true, said Jim Stockbauer, who bought the inn — at age 136, the oldest beer garden in central Texas — last December. Rather, the party was held under the license of the former owner; she got mad and took it back the next day, prodding Stockbauer to complete the paperwork and get the license in good shape.